The Dragon Lords--False Idols Read online

  By this point, Firkin wasn’t exactly sure what his message was meant to be, but he did know he didn’t like someone breaking his flow. He grabbed the attendant by the hair. He had a lot of it, loose, curly, and blond. Given the uniformly shaven heads in the crowd, Firkin suspected he wasn’t a local lad. The attendant yelped and twisted in Firkin’s grip.

  “They shout chaos at us,” Firkin said again. “We tell them to fuck off.”

  Yes, a voice seemed to whisper in his ear. That’s it. This is right.

  Firkin began pulling the boy toward the front of the altar. “We worship how we like. Our church. Our district. Our rules.” Another cheer. “We want to drink? We drink!” Another cheer. “We want to shit on their doorsteps? We shit on their doorsteps!” Another, louder cheer. He tossed another bottle into the crowd. The altar attendant jerked in his grip, and Firkin yanked back hard, sending the young man to his knees. “We want to fight? We fight!” Firkin yelled. “We want to knock the shit out of something? We kick its shit into next week.”

  The man with the spiked club drove it into the pew, and it was Firkin’s turn to cheer. He’d forgotten how much fun preaching could be. You could wrap pretty much any old shit in a holy robe, tell people it would make them feel better, and they’d eat it up with a spoon.

  Blood and wine, whispered the voice in his head. The old ways.

  And Firkin found he was grinning.

  “We want to get some good old blood sacrifice going?” Firkin asked the room.

  The cheer was deafening.

  “Yeah,” he said, “that’s what he thought.”

  He tossed the altar attendant to them. The clubs went up, and the clubs went down.

  And something inside Firkin’s head smiled.

  14

  The Loss of Cyrill’s Innocence

  Will wondered if he wished he was dead.

  Some priests reported that Lawl welcomed everyone to the Hallows with open arms, inviting them to lives of rest and pleasure. However, a lot of priests seemed to agree that the quality of one’s rest and pleasure depended on how much one donated to a particular god’s temple. Will had always been too cynical to accept that idea, but he did find himself a little concerned about the message—more common among the po-faced priests of Knole, Klink, and Toil—that one’s afterlife was actually spent in constant labor, furthering the great work of the gods. If labor is the best thing death has to offer, Will thought, then death can go fuck itself with a rusty shovel.

  Theerax’s guards had had him digging latrines all afternoon. His arms felt ready to fall off, his heart was still thundering in his chest, and he was covered in human excrement from head to toe. And yet as bad as he felt, he knew Cyrill was in an even worse state. The old man was unconscious on the cot beside him, and Will was fairly sure that he had suffered a pretty substantial systemic failure. Before he had collapsed, Cyrill’s limbs on one side of his body hadn’t seemed to be working properly, and even now his skin was the sort of white that made fresh snow appear a little dirty.

  It did not bode well for the evening Will had planned.

  Outside, though, night had fallen, and the guards had finally left them alone. And even though sleep clawed at Will, and even though he was half-convinced Cyrill had suffered a stroke, he knew this was the moment they had been waiting for.

  He leaned over and nudged Cyrill. The older man jerked awake with a noise like an ejaculating pig. “Yes, your … what?” he shouted.

  Will clamped a hand down over his mouth. “Shut up.” Cyrill’s eyes slowly reduced in size from full-on saucer to more of a toy dishware size. Slowly Will removed his hand.

  “Does Theerax need us?” Cyrill asked. He sounded eager.

  Will wondered what the punishment for murdering stupid old men was in the encampment. Probably a beating, since that was the punishment for everything else in the camp, from refusing to work to breathing at a volume a nearby guard found annoying.

  “No, you sycophantic moron,” he hissed at Cyrill. “I need you to spy with me so we can find all the incriminating shit.”

  Cyrill pouted. “I don’t think that would fit into the grand design.”

  “The grand design,” Will said, fighting to keep the volume of his voice below that of a murderous howl, “is to grind humanity beneath Theerax’s bootheel. Now you are here as an independent observer, not as a bootlicker. So get your arse in gear and independently observe me revealing something that gets the Batarran High Council on message.”

  Cyrill lay obstinately in bed.

  “Look,” Will said, fighting for leverage, “I’m pretty sure the council said you’d be promoted to a collator if you did a good job with this.”

  Cyrill sat up, as if someone had yanked his puppet strings. “Collator?” he said. “You heard them say collator.”

  And no, of course Will had not. “I think Theerax would be really impressed knowing he had a full-fledged collator among his faithful,” he went on blithely.

  “You think so?” Cyrill seemed the sort of man who was flattered so infrequently, he was unlikely to recognize whether it was genuine or not.

  Will nodded enthusiastically, and thus motivated, Cyrill scraped himself off his cot and accompanied Will to the back of the tent, where they clawed a few pegs free and snuck out into the chill night air.

  Crouched low, Will edged along the row of tents trying to spy a place that looked like it contained compromising information. Unfortunately, everything in this gods-hexed place looked the same. Starched white tent was lined up next to starched white tent. The same design for each. No flags. No ostentatious displays of color. Apparently Theerax’s grand design didn’t involve a very sophisticated grasp of color theory.

  “Screw it,” said Will, pulling back the flap to the next tent he passed. It was difficult to make things out in the dark, but it soon became apparent the place was full of tools. Shovels and ropes of a disappointingly innocent aspect.

  The next ten tents were similarly unhelpful.

  “Very suspicious,” said Cyrill, demonstrating a hitherto hidden capability for sarcasm. Will weighed the merits of ramming the ability back down Cyrill’s throat.

  They pushed on, deeper into the camp. From time to time patrols would send them scurrying down a side path, or between two tents. The deeper into the camp they went, the more frequent the patrols became. Will’s exhausted nerves sparked. Surely they must be getting closer to something Theerax wanted to hide.

  They had just finished sticking their noses into a tent full of sacks of vegetables when they heard a patrol approaching, shockingly close. Will grabbed Cyrill by the arm and dragged him back into the tent.

  “His nibs is in a bit of a mood tonight,” said a gruff female voice.

  “Watch your mouth,” hissed a younger woman. She sounded alarmed. “Theerax is our lord and deliverer and demands our respect.” She paused. “Plus, someone is always listening in this place.”

  Well, thought Will, she was right about one of those two.

  The older woman laughed. Their footsteps started up again. “I tell you,” said the older woman, “this gig got a lot less fun since Theerax actually showed up.”

  At this utterance, Cyrill let out a very high-pitched squeal. Will, not thinking clearly, grabbed the nearest thing to him, and attempted to murder Cyrill with a carrot.

  “Shut up!” he whispered.

  “He’s here!” Cyrill said, hopping up and down and hyperventilating. “Theerax is actually here!”

  Will closed his eyes and attempted to count to ten. He got as far as three and then replaced the remaining numbers with expletives. He listened for the sounds of guards running to investigate. He couldn’t hear anything over Cyrill’s feverish hyperventilating.

  After a moment of not being accosted by angry guards, Will grabbed Cyrill by the back of the neck and thrust him toward the entrance of the flap. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here before you attract any more attention.”

  He stepped ou
t after Cyrill. Unfortunately the old observer was in the process of letting out a squeal of fright and stopping short. Will built on this inauspicious continuation of their adventures by bumping straight into Cyrill’s arse, and grabbing for a sword hilt that wasn’t at his belt.

  “Hello, boys,” said Lette’s voice. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  Will found that he wasn’t too busy disentangling himself from Cyrill to sigh in relief. “Lette,” he said. “Oh, thank the gods.” Without thinking he went to wrap her in his arms, then caught her look and checked himself.

  “Hey!”

  And then Will found out that he had more things than social awkwardness to worry about, because the two guards had heard them after all, and had turned around, and had pulled out their swords.

  “Balls,” he muttered. Because this was always the part where his plans went horribly, horribly wrong, and tended to involve people’s insides becoming their outsides.

  The older guard stepped toward them, lowering her blade into a fighting stance as she came. But as she approached she passed into a patch of shadow between the intermittently posted torches. There she suddenly jerked to a halt. Then she let out a sputtering wet noise and convulsed. Then she stood absolutely still.

  Everyone, Will included, stared at the guard, who was now staring dumbly at the ground.

  The guard’s younger companion was the first to find her voice. “What—” she started.

  Suddenly the older guard’s body convulsed again, shaking back and forth, limp head flopping obscenely in and out of the light.

  “Doo-bee-doo-bee-doo,” said a growling voice in the shadows. “I am being a big bossy soldier. Be listening to me. Doo-bee-doo-bee-doo.”

  “—the fuck?” finished the younger guard.

  Then Balur stepped into the light. The fingers of his left hand were buried in the back of the lead guard, puncturing lungs, liver, and heart. He wielded the dead body, which he had been flopping like a puppet, and brought it down savagely on the head of the remaining guard.

  There was a lot of blood.

  Cyrill was quite noisily sick.

  “Hello,” Balur said cheerfully. Will couldn’t be entirely sure, in the flickering light of the guards’ dropped torches, but he thought Balur’s teeth were stained red.

  “Holy shit, Balur,” Will said, then found he didn’t have much else to say. What did someone say after that?

  It turned out that if you were Lette you just sighed and said, “Oh come on. We are attempting to be subtle here. This is meant to be a quiet infiltration.”

  Balur licked the air with a narrow tongue. “Quiet?” he said. “Really? Because”—he thumbed over his shoulder—“I was killing, like, thirty of them back there.”

  “Thirty?” Will’s voice headed for the higher registers.

  Balur shrugged. “I am being a little out of practice.”

  Lette snorted. “False modesty doesn’t suit you, you big bastard.”

  Balur grinned wickedly. “It was being more like forty-five. I was thinking Will might object.”

  Will threw up his hands. “But that I’d be okay with thirty?”

  Cyrill was sick again.

  “Is he being all right?” Balur said.

  “I don’t think we give a shit,” said Lette.

  Which, Will reflected, was probably pretty accurate. He tried to ground himself, ground this conversation. “We need him to see something that convinces him that this place is a threat to everybody in Batarra,” he said. It sounded pleasingly rational to his ear.

  For a moment Lette and Balur appeared suitably impressed by this pronouncement. It was spoiled by the sound of yells in the distance. Words like “Intruders!” and “To arms!” came over the night air.

  Will turned to look pointedly at Balur.

  “Never can be pleasing some people,” Balur groused.

  “No,” Will agreed. “You can’t.”

  “Perhaps,” Lette suggested, “we should be moving instead of pinning blame?”

  And while Will felt there was plenty of blame to be pinned at that precise moment, Lette had a point. So they moved, pushing deeper into the camp, away from the shouts and stomping boots.

  The groups they skirted around now were different. There were no longer patrols of soldiers, but rather ragged groups of them, helmets off, laughing and lounging. There were lone figures in hooded robes, walking with purpose, heads held high. There was a sense of happy industry.

  The tents they ducked into were smaller here too. No longer did they store vegetables, ropes, or shovels. Instead they held the beds for two or three soldiers. Or they were someone’s personal study. And the few storage tents they did come across held not work tools but weapons. Balur found two long blades that were at least passably balanced and shoved them through his belt. He threw a third to Will.

  “Be taking this,” he said.

  Will arched an eyebrow at him. “Me?” he said.

  “Reach,” Balur told him. “You do not need to be knowing much to just hold it out and be keeping someone farther away. And it is being better for blocking blows than your forearm.”

  “The idea is to avoid combat,” Will said. But he shoved the sword into his belt while Balur laughed in his face.

  “These people are surprisingly well stocked.” Lette looked around the tent. “This is of the scale of an invading army. Someone has been planning this for a very long time.”

  Will looked pointedly at Cyrill. “You’re writing this down, right? That bit about an invading army?”

  Cyrill blinked up at him. “Theerax is an organized being,” he said defensively. “Everything is organized to the scheme of the grand design.”

  “Except,” Lette cut in, “it isn’t just Theerax. There are other dragons all over Avarra. That’s been the news for weeks now. They’re all over the place, all preaching the same crap. That the gods are anarchic and awful—”

  “They are!” broke in Cyrill. “My prayers go unanswered. I kowtow to corrupt dilettantes who do nothing but swindle and diddle each other all day long. If that is the design of the gods, then I am ready to embrace the alternative.”

  Lette waved a hand dismissively. “Look,” she said, “no one here is arguing that the gods have done a great job. What we’re arguing is that the job they’ve done is still better than some totalitarian bullshit. Which, by the way”—she prodded Cyrill in the chest—“is exactly what we’re seeing here. I hope that’s going in your gods-hexed report.”

  “I,” said Cyrill self-importantly, “am here to find threats to Batarra, and so far I have seen none.”

  Lette cocked a fist at him. “Does this look like a threat to you?” Cyrill flinched back. “That’s what this encampment is,” Lette went on. “This camp is Theerax cocking a fist at all of Batarra.”

  “He’s here,” Will said quietly. He was still trying to mentally digest the idea.

  Lette turned to him sharply. “Who?”

  “Theerax,” Will said, truly feeling the weight of the word this time. “He’s in the camp.”

  Lette puffed out her cheeks, then started pacing in short, controlled circles. “Oh, it is go time then.” She nodded to herself. “Theerax’s move is surprise. Make this all seem peaceable enough. And then when he mounts his coup, the populace already wants him. So if he’s here we’re in the endgame.”

  And Will had known it. He’d just not wanted to admit it.

  “This,” said Cyrill, “is all wild supposition on your part. I have seen nothing to corroborate any of it.”

  Will thought about using the sword Balur had just given him.

  Balur himself was still stuck a few moments back in the conversation. “A dragon is being here?” he said.

  Lette sighed. “Oh put your murder boner back in your pants. You killed one dragon once, by luck.”

  “Two dragons.” Balur was indignant.

  Lette wheeled back on him. “One was drugged unconscious.”

  “Still counts,” Balur sna
pped back. “And the second I was in its mouth, murdering it in a volcano. That is not luck. That is being magnificent skill.”

  Lette considered this. “Okay, I’m not willing to concede magnificence, but I will acknowledge maybe more than just luck was involved there.”

  “Magnificent,” Balur repeated.

  “How about,” Will said, “we do this at a time when we don’t have about ten thousand better things to do? The most pressing being not being murdered by a dragon’s zealot army!”

  “Fine.” Balur held open the tent flap for them all in a poor imitation of graciousness.

  “Hey!” A man stood framed by the open tent flap. He had a helmet under one hand and was clearly halfway through unstrapping his steel breastplate.

  For a moment they all stood and stared at each other. Then several things happened at once.

  The man yelled, “Guards!”

  Cyrill yelled, “Save me!”

  Balur and Will drew their swords.

  Lette flung a knife across the room.

  The man collapsed with a blade protruding from his neck. Balur flicked an irritated glance at Lette.

  “Get quicker,” she said, as the lizard man hauled the dead body inside the tent. But already there was the sound of running and shouting, and then three guards were pushing into the tent, and even Lette wasn’t that fast.

  “Move!” Will yelled, which Balur did, but he moved to grab two of the men by the necks and shake them. The third he just bit in the face. This saved Lette from using her knives for deadlier work, however, and allowed her the time to slash a hole in the back of the tent.

  Less fortunately, the space behind the tent was full of guards.

  The next ten seconds were a blur of blood and fear. Will’s world rang with steel on steel. The harsh clang of his desperate parries. The sleek whistle of Lette’s blade gliding through her opponent’s guard. The cacophonous crashes of Balur’s blows knocking his opponents’ weapons aside.

  Then it was over, and Will was clutching a gash in his arm, and Lette was bleeding from her cheek.